Tommy’s War
As a family, we are honoured to hold within our archive a video recording of Thomas Benson, my great-grandfather, speaking about his experiences in the First World War.
Tommy was just sixteen and a half when he enlisted, before he was 17 and a half he was leading men, much older than himself, into battle.
In the recording, made when he was approaching his 91st birthday, we don’t just learn where he served or which battles he fought. We hear Tommy himself telling us what it was like.
He recalls Ypres, the trenches, the shelling, bully beef and biscuits, night patrols, and later the Somme. He also remembers men whose names never entered our family tree, but who stayed with him for the rest of his life.
One was “Big Mick Curry”, an Irish veteran of the South African War, proud of his medals. Tommy remembered him going forward with the young soldiers — and then, in an instant, he was gone.
Tommy himself was soon wounded and left alone on the battlefield. At one point, buried and unable to move, he remembers something unexpected amid the chaos:
“It was a glorious day.”
Above him, a skylark was singing.
“Just above, there was a skylark singing its heart out. It cheered me.”
That image has never left me: a young man trapped in the earth, surrounded by destruction, while above him the skylark simply carried on.
Eventually, he was dug out, carried, and wounded again as the battle continued around him. He survived, but only just.
These are fragments of a much longer testimony — Delville Wood, comrades lost, evacuation, and recovery in Britain. Some of it is hard to hear.
But it is extraordinary that we can hear it at all.
More than seventy years later, Tommy sat in front of a family camera and told his story in his own voice, his own words.
It makes me think about what families keep.
A video recording.
A diary.
A photograph with names on the back.
At what point does a family archive become something more than family history?
A military record can tell us that Thomas Benson served.
But only Tommy can tell us that, on the Somme, amid the guns, he heard a skylark singing above the battlefield.
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